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SIIA complains schools don't buy enough software
John writes "CNN is reporting on study by a software trade group which seems to claim that schools aren't spending enough on software. This begs a few questions. One of them is, what sorts of software is useful for schools? (Other than Oregon Trail, of course!) " *sigh* How do you explain that money doesn't enumerate all value?
I work for a school district, and as such we've spent a lot of time talking about this.
/.ers have mentioned the Rainforest program... it's nothing more than fancy Drill and Kill.)
Everyone is dancing around an issue here... How are the computers used in the classroom?
There is the "old school" approach, if you will, is something we call "Drill and Kill". These are the programs like Millie's Math House, or zillions of other pieces of software out there that simply reinforce ideas and processes repeatedly. You have to enter 1 + 1 = 2 over and over again until you're sick of it. If you went to school when computers were new, this is the type of software you used. (A few
"Drill and Kill" software is what the SIIA is getting at I suppose. Yes, it takes a zillion Drill and Kill programs to keep a classroom happy. They're boring as can be, and not really that much better than a simple workbook or a few handouts from a teacher.
Then there is the "new school" approach.
Shift away from the computer as a drill and kill tool, and make it a tool for creativity. Use the computer to allow the kids to be creative in ways they never have before... being able to integrate sounds and graphics and movies into a book report, for example.
What does this mean? Well, in reality a copy of Microsoft Office is really all you need to equip a machine in a computer lab... and maybe a few other small programs, like a typing tutor. (However, most (all?) of our typing classes are acutally just done in Word.)
Don't like Microsoft? There's many other possibilities out there, too. AppleWorks (ClairsWorks), HyperStudio, KidPics... the list is huge. These programs are quite different than their expensive one-purpose Drill and Kill counterparts, and allow the kids to be much more creative, and learn in ways they've never learned before.
It's neat to see a kid who never does well in school on "conventional" assignments get all excited and really get into a project on a computer.
Wrapping this back into the topic: Why aren't some schools spending much on software? They don't need to. They have the tools they need already.
- AC
What kind of gullible individuals would trust a report from a Trade Association claiming that we don't buy enough of their product?
Geez...what's next.."NRA says : Americans not buying enough guns"
or...
"McDonald's research finds : people not getting enough Filet-O-Fishes"
This whole thing sounds like an Onion story.
Dj wrote:
It's like complaining that no one does car mechanics but they all do driving lessons.
A perfect analogy. It's a device that most people will use, and it's a complicated device that we need to teach some people the inner workings. That's why most schools in my state (NYS) do offer both car mechanics and driving lessons. Granted most schools don't have the facilities for car mechanics, but they make collective arrangements so that someone with interest can learn.
With computers, most schools seem to have washed their hands of the whole programming aspect. They don't want to deal with teaching kids how to control the computers, just use them. Anyone who wants to learn to program has to teach themselves or wait until college in most parts of the state.
Another important thing about programming courses needs a little background. In case you haven't figured it out (don't worry, most people I've talked to haven't), the reason high schools make such a big deal about Math class has nothing to do with learning math. They know full well that few people require Euclid or Triginometry in the real world. It's there to teach you analytic problem solving, which is an important skill for everyone.
Programming teaches you algorithmic problem solving, which is another important skill for everyone. I think that at least Programming 101 should be a requirement, not a discarded option.
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Open mind, insert foot.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"To beg the question" is to assume that the conclusion of the argument is true (as one of the premisses of the argument).
Arguments aren't true or false; they're valid or invalid, sound or unsound.
(I just knew my ABD in philosophy would come in handy one day!)
--
6 + ~1
not,
7 + ~1.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
We have a mailing list, seul-edu, and a website, http://www.seul.org/edu/ that are dedicated to fostering educational applications for Linux. We have a number of programs both pedagogical and administrative and documents (HOWTOs, on-line texts) under development which I think you might find interesting. We can always use help and feedback. Please take a look at what we're doing and then join us!
Doug Loss
Brings back fond memories of the old apple IIe at my grade school. That game will always have a soft spot in my heart. I was the only one in my class that could make it to Oregon in one class period. (The dumbasses went at a grueling pace on bare bones rations.)
There's an idea for a great linux port.
Yeah, those damn fat-cat teachers, getting rich on their salaries for working only 10 months a year...
...never mind that many work about 60-70 hours a week during those 10 months, are paid relatively little, and are just as fed up with the "ever-expanding administration" as you are.
The teacher's unions *should* scream, as should taxpayers, to get more out of the money spent on schools. People are always so quick to blame the teachers - I've never understood that. I'm married to one, and let me tell you - there's no union conspiracy that *I* know of. In fact, most single teachers I know have trouble making ends meet.
Giving these kids subsidized net access is BAD. First, many can't read or write, let alone construct a thought or express an idea. Second, they're being dumped onto the net without the faintest idea of how things work. Third, not only is every last tax-serf forced to pay for their education that isn't educating, we're forced to pay for their net access (boy, I wish *I* could afford a T1!), AND we are forced to pay for bullshit "censorware" like NetNanny or Cybersitter, AND pay a bunch of librarians to sit around and read students' email. (If a student received or sent encrypted mail, they'd likely be banned from the computers, possibly viewed as a bomb threat in the post-Littleton climate.) But the worst part is that when they're done, they've learned nothing despite all the money that was thrown at them.
In one school, so I was told, no students were allowed to use the net for fear they might access evil information. They bought the connections and computers, but were too cheap to buy forty feet of cable to hook it up. And of course, the idiots bought multi-kilobuck PowerMacs, as if you needed that kind of power for web browsing. In the meantime, just about every place is running Windows, and any student who actually exhibits a clue is labeled a "hacker" and sent to the principal's office. Their "security" consists of having a network password that is the name of the school's mascot, and disabling the "Run" command on the Start menu. ACTUALLY KNOWING HOW THINGS WORK IS DISCOURAGED. We covered all this in the Littleton discussions, remember? Heaven forbid if a student telnets into a legitimate shell account not controlled by the school, or knows how to program in something other than BASIC.
The end effect of subsidizing free net access in the government slave camps known as "schools" will be to do an end run around any freedoms people still enjoy. The politicians who cry for a chicken in every pot and a T1 in every home would just love to have everyone in America given free net access, because then they could claim the net is a "public resource" and therefore needs to be regulated.
We are already paying too damn much, in money and tears, to lock children up and brainwash them. But of course, the Enlightened will lead the crowd with cries for MO' MONEY, MO' MONEY, MO' MONEY. Get rid of the compulsory attendance laws and give people a true CHOICE, and watch a thousand flowers bloom. Continue, and enjoy the spectacle of a boot smashing into a human face forever. Brother, you asked for it!
Fuck Slashdot
This just goes to show the inefficacy of computers in the classroom. Schools are given the computers because of course we have to have computers in the classroom, the president says so. Then the schools have to figure out what to do with them.
They could install all the latest whizzbang software at $500 a seat, or spend nothing and get the same end result. Guess what happens?
Computers don't teach kids. Teachers do. I am not convinced that a computer as a teaching tool is any more effective than a good teacher showing a videotape. The computer is a media tool, just like TV/VCR or an antiquated 'film-strip'.
I had a teacher once who did not know how to teach so he would sit us all down with a film strip, ignore us, and grade papers. We learned nothing. The same thing can happen with a bad teacher and classroom full of pentiums with an 'Explore the rain forests' CD-ROM - its just a hell of a lot more expensive.
Stop wasting money on computers/Internet in the school. Spend the money on paying teachers a respectable salary instead.
-josh
How do you explain that money doesn't enumerate all value?
:)
oh, but there is correlation! if people buy something, that means it has value to them!
but that's not the main point. the problem is not just schools not spending much, but also the industry not providing much of interest.
case in point, i recently talked with an old high school teacher of mine, and at one point he started telling me about the college-level calculus courses they're planning, and the difficulties they have finding the right software. his experience was that the market is pretty much split into silly puzzle-style programs on one end, and mathematica on the other - nothing in between. college freshmen trying to find good tutoring software to help them with calc can relate, i'm sure. no wonder people don't buy programs, if there's little available.
and secondly, regarding the poor quality of school software - i've worked for a while in one of the big public school systems, and educational software costs a lot. depending on software, it can get into upper double- and triple-digits per machine for a specialized program (times several dozen machines per lab). on one hand it's understandable, because a limited-market title is naturally going to be more expensive to offset production costs - but if you're an educator faced with a choice of spending your entire yearly software budget on one or two specialized titles, or several types of general productivity and math/statistics software, which one will you choose? considering present pricing and selection, no wonder we have curricula based around m$ office and mathcad.
which is not to say educators are not to blame. all too often they mistake typing and ms office classes for 'computer science education' - a distinction which i'm afraid is also often lost on college freshmen trying pick a major. labs are often run by people without much it training, who learn as they go. but that is more excusable. teachers are primarily educators, and shouldn't be expected to be necessarily computer savvy. somewhere higher up in the administration there should be people who keep up with technology, evaluate educational software, and advise the teachers, but we've still a way to go until then.
which brings us right back to not having good software to begin with.
My other car is a cons.
Schools have no money to spend. I was given 50,000(canadian) to spend on my dads school. After 25 iMacs and a couple of G3's, there is no money. Even with the discounts, we are short about 10,000. If companies got into their little heads that free software(or close to free) is the way to go. How are we supposed to teach kids on the magical new computers if they have no soaftware?
Ah, but that will only work unitl those corporations or schools have a disgruntled former employee or the SPA creates an incentive program (5% of the fine or something; do they already have something like this?) and then you're toast.
Money is usually really scarce, yes. But just to clarify - most of the software runs on Macs. We run all PC's at our [elementary] site, but every title we own is hybrid MacOS/Windows.
It seems to me that most of the kids games these days are created with Macromedia Director or Macromedia Authorware, both of which port software fairly easily between the two plaforms.
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
I've never heard of such software grants, I think you are mistaken. There are often reduced prices when you buy a 'site license' (which most often includes a license for 25 machines), but I guaruntee you that these companies don't give their software away. You are talking about a huge market here. Usually even the reduced prices aren't that great - they are usually way out of our reach at our school site.
As for Microsoft, the closest thing that Microsoft offers to what you are saying to schoools is an 'open license', and I know for sure that it is definately not free.
You might be confusing grants that different companies sometimes offer with site licenses. These grants require that you apply for them, and usually you are competing with a large number of other schools or organizations. One grant that I'm helping out with now has 400 other schools competing for it, and there is only one $3000 grant that will be awarded. Grants can be larger (even in the millions sometimes, though this is very very rare), but this usually means there are more organizations competing for it (often times thousands or tens of thousands). Chances of getting them are slim, and usually they choose the same schools or school districts repeatedly - which gets rather frustrating for the majority of the schools that repeatedly get nothing.
One school in a nearby district received a $1 million grant last year, and was awarded a $3 million grant for next year. It's especially frustrating to find after talking with some of the students that most of the technology isn't even being used.
As for the free software offers, I would be *really* intrested to see some URLs or phone numbers posted here. Otherwise, I would have to say that you are definately wrong about this.
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
As the technology coordinator of an elementary school, I don't buy much software because most of it is pretty bad. I have found that usually software that has good content is usually coded *really* bad (crashes regularly), and when I find software that runs decent (relative term) the content is pointless. It's pretty frustrating.
So, the kids learn how to actually use the computers most of the time rather than having them play useless games all the time. In the computer lab we take machines apart, they learn how to navigate through the file system I created, learn word processing skills, and they make extensive use of the Internet down to 2nd grade. I guess this is most useful for them to learn anyway.
I wish the software we have would run on Linux. Even more I wish the software companies would sell Linux versions of their software... but I realize this is a long way off if it ever happens. I am actually getting some Linux boxes together this weekend to deploy in a classroom or two in the next week or so (primarily for word processing and Internet access).
--SONET
Our School Technology Site
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
My point:
My school had a very good computer program from a monetary standpoint. I did learn a lot about applications. However, in order to learn more about things I was interested in I had to learn on my own about programming, operating systems, and more. I did learn on my own, I learned C/C++, Linux, HTML ... However spending more on software is useless if you don't have teachers competent enough to teach it.
Its because a lot (I mean ALOT) of schools are running clunky old 386 machines or MACS, niether of which are been supported by mainline software companies. You can hardly blame the schools, because it seems there is never enough money to buy paper for the copy machine let alone buy a fleet of new computers and software site licences every year.
It's a software TRADE GROUP. They're representatives of the companies that make and sell computer software. Companies like Microso~1, Borland, Adobe, etc. These companies make money by selling software.
This "report" was constructed solely for the purpose of generating revenue for the companies that sponsor the trade group. It's ridiculous. Most intelligent people will completely ignore it. However, some idiotic school board administrators will likely see the report and say, "We should spend a chunk of our budget on new computer software."
And you know what sucks about this? It's OUR money. We pay property taxes that go to the school districts. Even if you're renting, part of your rent goes to the property taxes for the building you live in. Arghh.
They say schools aren't buying enough.
I would actually say that these businesses aren't giving enough software away to schools. Things like OS's, Virus Protection, Development Tools, and Office applications should be offered free to by anyone to any public educational organization.
(Hmmm. Perhaps that statement should earn a "Well, DUH!")
Oh well, it's thinking like that which explains why I'm not a billionaire (or millionaire, or thousandaire).
No, he said *administrators* make 6 figures.
Teachers make crap. Admins make entirely too much, and have too much budget authority.
Ever visited your local dept of education office? Where I went, it was a pretty glass tower, with lots of plush carpeting. I had classes in a leaky trailer, with the teachers making $20k.
The first course used computers without really being a computing course. It was "Keyboarding" (a touch-typing class) taught on PCjrs. The teacher knew zero about PCjrs (good thing there was myself and another geek there, or we wouldn't have booted them), and she probably used to teach typing on manual typewriters. She was a strict disciplinarian, which is exactly what is needed for this course. Touch typing doesn't expand your mind, but is the ultimate drill 'n kill course. While she taught us touch-typing, we taught her a bit about computers and lightweight word processing. Note: this was the type of room that taught IBM to leave the cords on the keyboards. Thirty PC jrs in one room, each of them connected to their keyboard by nothing but infrared and no auth codes--we had lots of fun standing up and aiming our keyboards at each others' computers!
The other course, called "Computer Programming" or somesuch, was on the venerable Apple ][. The teacher, in this case, knew at least a bit about programming. The school didn't have a "CS" department, so it made the course a math elective. If you assume that higher math exists in school to stretch your mind in abstract directions, programming does make for a fine math course.
We spent the first half of the year programming in BASIC, and the second half programming in Pascal.
Three notes to slashdotters still in school.
First, when using computers in a course about computers, some teachers don't mind being taught computers while teaching you the real subject matter. This helps the next class.
Second, anyone who intends to spend their career at a console or terminal should take a typing course. It's boring. It's harsh. It's the worst nightmare of drill 'n kill. But it's useful drill 'n kill. With touch typing, you can just think the words and your fingers will get them into the computer for you. People don't naturally progress from hunt 'n peck to touch typing; the only way I know to gain the skill is the drill 'n kill. It beats burning brainpower over the next forty years watching your keyboard, looking for the 'v' key. Barring direct neural interface, touch typing is the shortest line between you and the box.
Third, enjoy those computer courses where you know more than the teacher. You will still learn something from the teacher, and you may be able to teach the teacher some neat tricks (again, be careful and don't try to show off your wizardly superiority). Most importantly, however, is that you can turn the course into an opportunity to gain school credit for hacking. If you can stump the teacher, you're likely finishing assignments early. Use that opportunity to hack at what you want to hack at--if you have a good teacher, they'll help you in your endeavors. One of the best ways to learn coding is to write code. Consider it a lab course to do exactly that. Besides, it sure beats study hall ;^>
--The basis of all love is respect
In my junior year of high school (1985-86), my school offered two computer courses: a one-hour-per-day course in Pascal (taught on original IBM PCs), and a two-hour-per-day course in BASIC (taught on a mix of Apple ][+'s and ][e's). I chose BASIC, because I'd been using it for years already and, frankly, I wanted to have an easy double A to balance out the low grade I always got in PE (due to having many 'non-suit' days since I hated sports). Boy, was I mistaken in thinking that it would be simple!
/do/ with what they have. Teach people the general skills and they'll be OK. But, of course, that gets into the whole problem of educational institutions teaching their students how to memorize useless facts instead of teaching them how to /learn/.
That course turned out to be one of the best I've ever taken. Yeah, it was on already-ancient Apple ]['s. Yeah, it was in BASIC. But the instructor actually knew what the heck he was doing, and he taught us Structured BASIC. GOTO's were not allowed. We had to learn to use WHILE loops. We had to put colons in as whitespace to make the stuff prettyprint. And he was a pretty darned good software tester, and wouldn't let you move on until your program was bulletproof.
All of that came in very handy when I later moved on to C. I would have been lost, otherwise. So I'm still benefitting from the things I learned in that course, even though I took it 13 years ago, even though we were using Apple ]['s, and even though we were using a form of BASIC.
Contrast that with the university I attended, which had modern (for the time) 386's. I took the required introduction to computers course, and learned such 'useful' things as what a CPU is, what the difference between RAM, ROM, and disk space is, and how to flowchart a program (although we never actually typed in a program in that class). The bulk of the time was spent on learning how to use Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, WordPerfect for DOS, and DBase for DOS.
Of course, I already knew all that stuff, so I was bored out of my mind. Yet the course was required, even though the information was fairly useless.
The point of my stories is that the equipment and software doesn't matter as much as what the instructors
So, yes, it would be nice if every school, college, and university had a computer with a full range of programs and a fast connection to the internet on every desk. But the likelihood of that is miniscule, so it'd be nice if more attention was paid to what is taught than what sort of equipment is used.
-Joe
Arrgh! No one is begging any questions here. "To beg the question" is a fallacy where one assumes that an argument is true while attempting to prove its truth. It does not mean "to request that a question be addressed". If you look "beg" up in any dictionary, you'll see an entry referring to the idea of evasion or side-stepping (probably the third entry or so). That's the sense, here.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I've worked at a few departments on my campus the years I've been in college, and I can tell you one thing - if they have even two licenses for a piece of software that they use on 100 machines, I'd be damn well surprised. I rememeber my boss copying NT Server off of a CD a friend in another department mounted in his server...
The fact is, no one cares, and no one checks. We burned off copies of software for professors for use at home, for ourselves...any reason at all. It keeps the departmental budgets down, and makes things look good to the accounting department. Sure, they're supposed to buy licenses, and we get pretty good deals on them too....but....there's paperwork to be done for buying things - and it's easier.
And we all know it's not just my school, it's everywhere - exceptt those that may have draconian accounting policies. I'll wager a large number of corporations do as well.
But hey. I'd launch into a huge comment on piracy, but I'll stay on topic.
TY
This would actually be a great setup, if one could ever convince a braindead administration of that. Having one high-end Linux/BSD/Whatever box in the closet with some old 486's as X servers hitting it would be sweet. However, the school would have to hire a rather visionary technology coordinator to make this happen.
The problem is that school administrators are too much like any other administrators in the world: looking for prepackaged solutions that can be summed up in a pat "proposal". The idea of putting a unix host with some terminals and then setting the students free is, I expect, rarely even imagined.
This reminds me of a story. When I was in Junior high we had only 3 computers: an AppleII+ and two TRS-80's. The library decided to catalog their books on the Apple and had a student write the program for them. He did, but then he left the school and on the last day the program crashed. Did they hire a "consultant" to come in and fix it. Of course not; they grabbed me and a friend and had us pour through his 600 lines of Applesoft BASIC and fix the problem. What a neat experience for a kid that was. I don't think that this happens much anymore.
Well, I think it is obvious to the free sofware crowd that the money spent by schools on software is a lousy measure of of their dedication to computer education. I think a better measure is to check the class sizes of real computer courses and the number of machines available per student in such classes. Also, to note the fall of computer science type classes (read: programming) and the rise of application classes. I think, seriously, that your average computer class these days is an overglorified version of typing 101.
When I was a kid we learned BASIC in junior high and assembler and PASCAL in high school. I was in a high school recently that had no programming classes at all. However, they did have 90+ PC's in their Business Ed department, all running Word and Excel.
Obviously something is wrong here.
Basically do not trust the public schools to educate you or your children. all of my kids (5 of them!) have a 386,486or pentium in their room to play with (Only linux on them except for the 7 and 8 year old girls.. they need to run barbie software, but it dual boots) and I require Linux/programming work to be done by them. My 17 year old admins my business (ISP) and programs in perl/C/python/bourne-shell and has written a device driver for linux (for a hardware card I designed) my 14 year old is learning C now after PERL and sysadmin stuff. and my 11 year old is learning the sysadmin end and Perl. why?? so they will kick the butts of every other person they come up agains in the world, they will knw what computers are all about (my 17 year old died laughing when he was told by a MS tech that NT is harder to learn than Unix and will take alot of learning to master... he mastered NT server in 2 weeks and then asked me to delete that crap from his hard drive)
:-) everything we need is FREE online :-)
There is a lesson here.... School sucks, live with that fact, but you dont have to live with it, you can self educate/ educate your children. I spend $3K per year on my childrens computer education for hardware and some years I double that. software?? we buy nothing except games
BTW: my kids still cant kick my butt in quake, but they do whine because I play on the Qake server....
I'm a 15 year old Sophmore at a school that is considered "rich" in Amarillo, TX. Your tax dollars and the computers that it buys are being wasted. We have about one Macintosh computer per classroom, and the teachers are the ONLY one's who ever use them. The only times I have ever used a computer at school is in the library, and for Keyboarding IA. I'll be taking Computer Science next year, on 486 Wintel machines. The one's for keyboarding class are I think 386's, possibly 286's running Windows 3.1. All the burcratic crap about a computer in every classroom is a lot of bull. Almost all of the teachers just use them to compile our grades, that's it. And most of them have no clue how to use them. A few do need/know how to use computers, but it's a small minority. We have, I think, 4 computer labs, two of them are for just any classroom that wants them, the other two are for computer specific courses. Everyone of those computers suck, and run outdated software. For example, we have semester tests coming up, so my Spanish teacher decided to go to the computer lab to run some Spanish programs so it would help us study. Needless to say, the programs are incredibly uninteresting, and do not help in the least bit. I would learn much more if the teacher just reviewed us. As for internet connections, I've only been on once during school. Our whole class went to the library (the only place where you can get on the net) to look up housing prices in Houston for a project. I guess it was useful, but geez, I'm a sophmore and only used the internet once at school? I thought that I would get on a lot more than that listening to Congress. The computer situations in schools suck right now. They rather give their extra money to the athelets than the computer nerds.
I manage a computer tech department at a fairly large college (which anyone with half a brain can figure out with one click! :). I have a few comments on the story and on the followup comments:
Regardless, if the SPA ever did audit us or any other school, they should be shot. That story is a big crock and it almost seems like they are trying to set up a justification to starting campaigns to audit schools for software piracy just because low expendiatures on software just must indicate software piracy internally.
The problem is that teaching is a profession that tends to attract people who are less likely to be technologically proficient. A lot of people from my high school are now teachers, and not one of them majored in any type of scientific or engineering field.
This is because, for a lot of people, teaching is a "backup" profession: after finding that a BS in Italian doesn't apply to many jobs, it's easy to go back to school and get a teaching credential. People who have an engineering degree can find jobs pretty easily, as can, for the most part, people with science degrees. So the teaching ranks end up being rather heavily weighted towards people with liberal arts degrees.
There are, of course, people who go into teaching as their first choice, but it's rare for these people to be into science and technology. This is unfortunate, as technology becomes even more important in the future.
I'm not sure what can be done about this, though. The US doesn't have a culture that values teachers very highly, and so it's hard to find people who are interested in going into teaching as a first choice. Teaching is a rather low paying job (although teachers usually get 3 months off a year), so it doesn't have much draw for those people who can find other jobs, especially tech ones.
The teachers who are into tech, though, can really make a difference. My jr. high computer teacher definitely changed my life by taking the time to encourange my interests in programming...
I didn't see a computer in school until I got into high school (Back in the mid '80's) and the high school had a computer lab with about 20 Apple II's of various makes. I took a BASIC programming class and did OK. Between my sophomore and my Junior year I availed myself of the "High School Summer Program" that the college my father worked at was putting on. There I learned Watfiv (A fortran derivative) and DEC assembley language. When I returned to high school for the advanced BASIC and beginner Pascal courses. If I'd been able to stay in that school for my senior year I would have been taking advanced and AP Pascal, where the students were writing recursive descent parsers. We moved however, and my last year of high school was in the deep south. They'd just got fortran for the Apple that year and didn't know their way around the software. I did, because it was the same environment that PASCAL was in, so I ended up teaching the class for the first couple of weeks. That year I wrote a graphing program in PASCAL for my last project, and with only about 15K of memory to work with I had to swap even my keyboard routines to disk. Those certainly were educational machines.
Anyway, it's my view that if you want to REALLY educate the students about computers they're going to have to see how they WORK. To do that, closed source software is simply not going to cut it. You can get Linux for free and make as many copies as you want. You get a wonderful programming environment and basic software tools that could be used to write reports and whatnot. You can look under the hood and see how anything that interests you works. And what's more, you can run it quite well with a GUI on a 486/66 and quite well with a command prompt with a system as low-end as a 386 SX. So you can put that round of hardware buying off for another year and perhaps hire someone who might be able to teach your kids something about the computers.
All in all, Linux is a much more "educational" environment than Windows or MacOS, and you benefit from not having to worry about silly licensing problems. An in the know school board should not only advocate Linux usage, they should mandate it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?